'You already have copies of these things?' she said.
'No,' I said. 'Not a scrap.'
'You don't write any more?' she said.
'There hasn't been anything I've wanted to say,' I said.
'After all you've seen, all you've been through, darling?' she said.
'It's all I've seen, all I've been through,' I said, 'that makes it damn nearly impossible for me to say anything. I've lost the knack of making sense. I speak gibberish to the civilized world, and it replies in kind.'
'There was another poem, your last poem, it must have been — ' she said, 'written in eyebrow pencil on the inside of the trunk lid.'
'Oh?' I said.
She recited it for me:
Hier liegt Howard Campbells Geist geborgen,
frei von des Korpers qualenden Sorgen.
Sein leerer Leib durchstreift die Welt,
und kargen Lohn dafur erhalt.
Triffst du die beiden getrennt allerw?rts
verbrenn den Leib, doch scheme dies, sein Herz.
In English?
Here lies Howard Campbell's essence,
Freed from his body's noisome nuisance.
His body, empty, prowls the earth,
Earning what a body's worth.
If his body and his essence remain apart,
Burn his body, but spare this, his heart
There was a knock on the door.
It was George Kraft knocking on my door, and I let him in.
He was very jangled because his corn-cob pipe had disappeared. It was the first time I'd seen him without the pipe, the first time he showed me how dependent he was on the pipe for peace. He was so full of anxiety that he whined.
'Somebody took it or somebody knocked it down behind something or — I just can't imagine why anybody would have done anything with it,' he whined. He expected Helga and me to share his anxiety, to think that the disappearance of the pipe was the most important event of the day. He was insufferable.
'Why would anybody touch the pipe?' he said. 'What good would it do anybody?' He was opening and shutting his bands, blinking often, sniffling, acting like a dope addict with withdrawal symptoms, though he had never smoked anything in the missing pipe. 'Just tell me — ' he said, 'why would anybody take the pipe?'
'I don't know, George,' I said testily. If we find it, well let you know.'
'Could I look around for myself?' he said. 'Go ahead,' I said.
And he turned the place upside down, rattling pots and pans, banging cupboard doors, fishing back of the radiators with a poker, clangingly.
The effect of this performance on Helga and me was to wed us — to urge us into an easy relationship that might otherwise have been a long while coming.
We stood side by side, resenting the invasion of our nation of two.
'It wasn't a very valuable pipe, was it?' I said.
'Yes it was — to me,' he said. 'Buy another one,' I said.
'I want that one,' he said. 'I'm used to it. That's the pipe I want' He opened the breadbox, looked inside.
'Maybe the ambulance attendants took it,' I said.
'Why would they do that?' he said. 'Maybe they thought it belonged to the dead man,' I said. 'Maybe they put it in the dead man's pocket.' That's it cried Kraft, and he scuttled out the door.
23: Chapter Six Hundred and Forty-three ...
One of the things Helga had in her suitcase, as I've already said, was a book by me. It was a manuscript I had never intended that it be published. I regarded it as unpublishable except by pornographers.
It was called Memoirs of a Monogamous Casanova. In it I told of my conquests of all the hundreds of women my wife, my Helga, had been. It was clinical, obsessed, some say, insane. It was a diary, recording day by day for the first two years of the war, our erotic life — to the exclusion of all else. There is not one word in it to indicate even the century or the continent of its origin.
There is a man of many moods, a woman of many moods. In some of the early entries, settings are referred to sketchily. But from there on, there are no settings at all
Helga knew I kept the peculiar diary. I kept it as one of many devices for keeping our sexual pleasure keen. The book is not only a report of an experiment, but a part of the experiment it reports — a self-conscious experiment by a man and a woman to be endlessly fascinating to each other sexually — .
To be more than that.
To be to each other, body and soul, sufficient reasons for living, though there might not be a single other satisfaction to be had.
The epigraph of the book is to the point, I think.
It is a poem by William Blake called 'The Question Answered':
What is it men in women do require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
What is it women do in men require?
The lineaments of Gratified Desire.
I might aptly add here one last chapter to the Memoirs, chapter 643, describing the night I spent in a New York hotel with Helga, after having been without her for so many years.
I leave it to an editor of taste and delicacy to abridge with innocent polka dots whatever might offend.
MEMOIRS OF A MONOGAMOUS CASANOVA, CHAPTER 643
We had been apart for sixteen years. My first lust that night was in my fingertips. Other parts of me ... that were contented later were contented in a ritual way, thoroughly, to ... clinical perfection. No part of me could complain, and no part of my wife could complain, I trust, of being victimized by busy-work, time-serving... or jerry-building. But my finger tips had the best of it that night...
Which is not to say that I found myself to be an ... old man, dependent, if I was to please a woman, on ... foreplay and nothing more. On the contrary, I was as ... ready a lover as a seventeen-year-old ... with his ... girl...
And as full of wonder.
And it was in my fingers that the wonder came. Calm, resourceful, thoughtful, these ... explorers, these ... strategists, these ... scouts, these ... skirmishers, deployed themselves over the ... terrain.
And all the news they gathered was good...
My wife was a ... slave girl bedded with an ... emperor that night, seemingly struck dumb, seemingly not even able to speak a word of my language. And yet, how eloquent she was, letting her eyes, her breathing ... express what they must, unable to keep them from expressing what they must... .
And how simple, how sublimely familiar was the tale her ... body told ... It was like the breeze's tale of what a breeze is, like the rose's tale of what the rose is....
After my subtle, thoughtful and grateful fingers came greedier things, instruments of pleasure without memories, without manners, without patience. These my slave girl met in greedy kind ... until Mother Nature herself, who had made the most extravagant demands upon us, could ask no more. Mother Nature herself ... called an end to the game....
We rolled apart....
We spoke coherently to each other for the first time since bedding down.
'Hello,' she said.
'Hello,' I said.
'Welcome home,' she said.
End of chapter 643.
The city sky was clean and hard and bright the next morning, looking like an enchanted dome that would shatter at a tap or ring like a great glass bell.
My Helga and I stepped from our hotel to the sidewalk snappily. I was lavish in my courtliness, and my Helga was no less grand in her respect and gratitude. We had had a marvelous night
I was not wearing war-surplus clothing. I was wearing the clothes I had put on after fleeing Berlin, after shucking off the uniform of the Free American Corps. I was wearing the clothes — fur-collared impresario's cloak and blue serge suit — I had been captured in. I was also carrying, for whimsy, a cane. I did marvelous things with the cane: rococo manuals of arms, Charlie Chaplin twirls, polo strokes at orts in the gutter.